2 STEP

There are paintings of dancers. And there are paintings that dance. Acclaimed US painter Nina Chanel Abney offers both in '2 STEP', her spectacular response to the famed Dance murals Henri Matisse made at the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, in 1932-33. In an abstracted landscape that could be a beach or a pool, dancers jump, slide, wave and gesticulate with jubilant, syncopated energy. Their flat bright colours and crisp clear outlines reveal Abney’s long-time fascination with Matisse and his late cut-outs, and with the ways in which the Black modernist Romare Bearden (1911-88) used a Matissean visual language to tell stories of his time.

Abney riffs on the pastoral themes and scenes of luxurious pleasure found in early Matisse, while adding ambiguous signs and details that remind us that this is a work from the 21st century. The dancers appear to have kicked past gates to reach this paradisiacal landscape, where they exchange facial features and body parts in a celebration of gender-fluidity. Abney’s iconic X-signs could be kisses or visual ‘beats’ but also suggest censorship or erasure, while the black silhouettes that raise their arms, as if in joy, could also be figures surrendering under threat of violence (Abney has created a number of works that directly address police brutality in contemporary America). There’s a hint of masquerade and reclamation too, as the dancers don white masks that sometimes allude to Matisse and Picasso’s modernist primitivism.

Abney has named her painting not for the ballroom two-step but a fundamental move in hip-hop dancing – a simple step from which a dancer can build (as Abney does visually) something complex and dazzling. Created as part of her project 'FRAMILY TIES' for the Gallery’s 2021 Matisse Alive program, Abney’s '2 STEP' is a portrait of unbound, collective energy that energises any room it hangs in.